Photograph by: Nam Y. Huh
, AP

ON INTERSTATE 94 EAST - A playoff series you can cover without getting on an airplane is the best.

Driving, even five hours of it, beats taxis and two airports and security.

Lunch at a Cracker Barrel in Battle Creek, Mich., beats a heavily-preserved, scalded pizza pocket on a plane that came off the production line in 2005 (the food, not the aircraft).

The only downside of such intimacy as Detroit and Chicago share — two excitable hockey towns, division rivals, Original Six icons, soon to be divorced by the coming NHL realignment — is that the heat generated by the series is intense, and participants and fans and media alike tend to suffer an every-second-night rush of blood to the head, and reason rarely reigns.

Case in point: the fickleness of the discussion as to who is out-coaching whom in the Blackhawks-Red Wings’ series, which Detroit leads 3-2 heading to Monday’s Game 6 at Joe Louis Arena.

Joel Quenneville, his Blackhawks having scored just two goals while losing three games in a row after taking the opener, was (by some reckonings) coaching from the edge of the abyss, his job in danger.

If the Hawks had lost Game 5 Saturday at home, the rumours seemed to be saying, he might achieve the rare double of being a finalist for the Jack Adams Trophy as NHL coach of the year while simultaneously looking for work.

That would be a little like Alain Vigneault getting fired in Vancouver three weeks after his Canucks won their sixth division title in seven years. But it happened, so you couldn’t totally dismiss the Quenneville rumblings, either, even on the heels of Chicago’s Presidents’ Trophy season.

Mike Babcock, meanwhile, was playing his Red Wings like a virtuoso on a stringed instrument, deploying Henrik Zetterberg to neutralize Jonathan Toews, rolling four lines, lending ever more credence to his coming re-appointment as Canada’s Olympic team coach.

Quenneville? Poor guy was out of his depth.

Then the Blackhawks won 4-1 to close the series deficit to 3-2, a win so all-encompassing it was practically certain to plant seeds of doubt in the minds of the Red Wings.

What masterstroke had Quenneville concocted to achieve this reversal of form? He stacked one forward line with Toews, Patrick Kane and Patrick Sharp, and released defenceman Brent Seabrook from the doghouse, reuniting him with his longtime partner, Duncan Keith.

In short, he said: “I have an idea that’s so crazy it just might work. Why not do what we used to do, back when we were really good?”

Rocket science, it was.

Of course, he had the benefit of being in a 3-1 hole, one loss from elimination, which gave his team a level of urgency the Red Wings could not artificially create.

“The reality is, it’s a race to four,” said Babcock. “You’ve got to put teams away, they’re not going away. It’s not like they’ve got a holiday booked somewhere they gotta get to. They’re competing to stay in it. We thought we had done a pretty good job expressing that prior to the game, but obviously in our play it didn’t show.”

Moreover, Quenneville had the benefit of home ice, and hence the last line change, enabling Toews to escape Zetterberg to a great extent. As for putting Seabrook back with Keith ...

“The problem really wasn’t on the back end, it was production,” Quenneville said Sunday. “Reuniting those two, our overall pairs, may get more offence from them. But defensively we’ve been fine.”

It wasn’t intended, he said, to send a message. Only sort of.

“I think at this stage of the game it’s who deserves to play and who’s playing well. The better you play, the more you get,” he said. “Sometimes it’s matchups, sometimes you want to max out each individual. There are a lot of things that weigh in with ice time and how much, and usually it’s merit. It’s critical. Regular season’s the regular season. Playoffs are a different animal.”

And so, Monday it is Babcock’s turn. Will he put his forward lines in the blender? Demote Jonathan Ericsson to a lower rung on the defensive ladder because of his tanglefooted Game 5 performance, when he looked like a young Bambi taking his first steps?

“It’s easier to control the matchup when you have home ice,” said Zetterberg. “We’ll have it tomorrow and we’ll see what coach wants to do. I think sometimes you can coach a little bit too much and try to match up too much, but I think also when you have a chance to have the last change, you should take advantage of it.”

Babcock always tries to make it simpler than it is — maybe because it’s us he’s talking to — but he figures the whole matchup game, one of the few aspects of game coaching that people understand, can be overrated.

It was Saturday.

“When the game got going and they were playing better than us, they could play anybody against anybody,” he said.

“It’s great that they played good, but it didn’t have anything to do with us. We didn’t do anything. I’m not trying to take anything away from Chicago. We got to play harder, more desperate, more organized, more detail-oriented. We weren’t a very good hockey team.”

For one night, they weren’t. For one night, the Hawks were.

And Monday at The Joe, it will happen all over again. The winner will be anointed the smartest coach ever, and the other guy will be sent to the corner to put on the dunce cap.

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